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[RodriguesSting]

I am really enjoying this new race, and after seeing some videos, I think I am ready for trying. Been quite some time since last time I played dwarf fortress, and even though I know I really should master the dwarfs first (something I never did), I am totally looking into playing with those guys.

However, I don't really know the ideal skills for my starting warlock(s), and the skills they apparently can learn don't match with the ones I can assign them to in embark (like Praying and Writing). No video showed this yet.

So, what's the ideal skill set? Also, the embark assign creatures randomly. I can start with 4 skeletons, 2 ghouls and a warlock, or with 2 vampires, 3 warlocks, 1 skelly and 1 ghoul. Got these and a few other combinations during my first tests. So, besides the skills, what kind of embark would be ideal?

[Arcvasti]

I am really enjoying this new race, and after seeing some videos, I think I am ready for trying. Been quite some time since last time I played dwarf fortress, and even though I know I really should master the dwarfs first (something I never did), I am totally looking into playing with those guys.

However, I don't really know the ideal skills for my starting warlock(s), and the skills they apparently can learn don't match with the ones I can assign them to in embark (like Praying and Writing). No video showed this yet.

So, what's the ideal skill set? Also, the embark assign creatures randomly. I can start with 4 skeletons, 2 ghouls and a warlock, or with 2 vampires, 3 warlocks, 1 skelly and 1 ghoul. Got these and a few other combinations during my first tests. So, besides the skills, what kind of embark would be ideal?

3 Ghouls, 2 Warlocks, 2 Skeletons
1 Ghoul Butcher
2 Ghoul Military/Hunters
1 Warlock Necromancer
1 Warlock Sorcerer
1 Skeleton Miner
1 Skeleton Engraver

would be my preferred set-up. Miner is needed, military and butcher are needed and Necromancy and Sorcery are the most important early Warlock jobs. Engraving is really good when you use lots of ethereal furniture.

[RodriguesSting]

1 Warlock Necromancer
1 Warlock Sorcerer
would be my preferred set-up. Miner is needed, military and butcher are needed and Necromancy and Sorcery are the most important early Warlock jobs. Engraving is really good when you use lots of ethereal furniture.

That's a pretty good suggestion, but I need to know what skills those two warlocks would have, specially because I don't now what skills Necromancer and Sorcerer jobs uses.

Edit: Also, can I assign hunting job for ghouls? Would be easier than manually choosing every single animal I seek to kill.

Edit 2: Apparently, Magic and Sorcery are skills, according to Dwarf Therapist, but I really can't find them in the embark screen.

[Arcvasti]

That's a pretty good suggestion, but I need to know what skills those two warlocks would have, specially because I don't now what skills Necromancer and Sorcerer jobs uses.

Edit: Also, can I assign hunting job for ghouls? Would be easier than manually choosing every single animal I seek to kill.

Edit 2: Apparently, Magic and Sorcery are skills, according to Dwarf Therapist, but I really can't find them in the embark screen.
[/quote]

I don't think you can get sorcery at the embark screen, but you might be able to get Necromancy, which uses the "Praying" labour. If not, then just put them on the job, as Warlocks skill up quickly at both those tasks. As for having hunter ghouls, I personally find it more convenient to manually designate wildlife deaths as opposed to having to manage ammunition and all the other myriad annoyances of the hunting labour. Plus I don't believe hunters wear more then leather armour, so having a dedicated military is better for the ghoul's health. I'm also not so sure ghouls can gain skill in ranged weapons, so it might not work anyways. I've never used hunting, because I personally don't like it. As of the last patch, I think that you can, indeed enable hunting for ghouls.

[RodriguesSting]

Well, apparently, some Magic Weapon Using did the trick to increase their praying skill. Odd.

Ghouls can't use any weapons besides flails, according to the manual, so yeah, no hunting for them.

Man, it will take quite some time to get used to this game again.

Anyways, thanks.

[Omnicast]

Don't worry about adding skill points into those two.

Necromancy or Praying levels up pretty fast as long as you either raise a bunch of zombies or make skeletons. I don't recommend raising a bunch of zombies... FPS death. 20-30 is a okay number.

Sorcery is used in summoning furniture and blocks at the Eternal Gate. You can summon colored blocks, armor stand, statues, weapon racks, beds, chests, doors, cabinets, tables and chairs. This also levels up sorcery and that in turn summons better quality furniture. You could also use the blocks to wall yourself in. I think it's also used for magic spells, but I haven't touched that yet... making books is taking a long time.

Also the manual is outdated and lacking. Soul Syphon uses the sorcery skill not the praying skill.

This building is absolutely essential. Without it souls wither then disappear. So set them up near Graveyard that are farming souls and butchery. This also applies to buildings made with souls and not phylacteries. The buildings would literally deconstruct after the souls vanish. So when your making buildings that require souls use the phylacteries and not the souls themselves.

[Mithril Leaf]

Don't worry about adding skill points into those two.

Necromancy or Praying levels up pretty fast as long as you either raise a bunch of zombies or make skeletons. I don't recommend raising a bunch of zombies... FPS death. 20-30 is a okay number.

Sorcery is used in summoning furniture and blocks at the Eternal Gate. You can summon colored blocks, armor stand, statues, weapon racks, beds, chests, doors, cabinets, tables and chairs. This also levels up sorcery and that in turn summons better quality furniture. You could also use the blocks to wall yourself in. I think it's also used for magic spells, but I haven't touched that yet... making books is taking a long time.

Also the manual is outdated and lacking. Soul Syphon uses the sorcery skill not the praying skill.

This building is absolutely essential. Without it souls wither then disappear. So set them up near Graveyard that are farming souls and butchery. This also applies to buildings made with souls and not phylacteries. The buildings would literally deconstruct after the souls vanish. So when your making buildings that require souls use the phylacteries and not the souls themselves.

Another important thing to note is that you can totally level up your necromancy by scrounging up corpses in the Graveyard, which is a net production of things, but you cannot do so with just soul summoning.

[blapnk]

About the suggestions and new unit types, when voodoo priests were mentioned along side skeleton mages/liches, my first assumption was they'd be ghouls upgraded to spell casters. So you have your basic castes of warlocks ghouls and skeletons, the later two can be upgraded to mages too.

I liked the flavour of using an actual living pet for prisoners, it made the process feel a lot more unique and real. Reliability may be worth the loss though.

Build-able ghouls and thrulls sound fun, create monsters!

I'm still interested in hearing about ways to be able to get more spell casters/warlocks and what limits that growth. Because if I could get as many of those as I want the first thing I'd work towards is using the werebeast lair to create an army of red dragons. Would mega-beast souls be a good limiter? Can you invite an unlimited amount of megabeasts through the embassy or is that tied to world-gen numbers and you might not even get any if there aren't enough in your area?

As it is, I'm personally not too interested in new warlock classes, they're already so customisable with their spells and their lack of numbers means you might not even have enough for a warlock of each caste (assuming they can swap). I'm guessing the point is so they start off with a few useful spells at the beginning before you've got the library set up? Is it possible to integrate that with the existing spell system so the castes automatically learn their specialised spells when they spawn and other castes can learn those same spells from the library the regular way? That way you don't need to worry about not getting the exact right mix of castes in the long run

[megahelmet]

This also levels up sorcery and that in turn summons better quality furniture.

Don't worry about only using masterwork summoned furniture. All summoned items have a native value of 0 so there is no benefit in it being of good quality.

[RodriguesSting]

This also levels up sorcery and that in turn summons better quality furniture.

Don't worry about only using masterwork summoned furniture. All summoned items have a native value of 0 so there is no benefit in it being of good quality.

So, if I really want to build a luxurious room/tomb, I must use real materials?

Edit: Skelletons are the only ones capable of crafting with real materials? Can warlocks do any menial job at all, even if they don't learn it? Ghouls can only butcher and haul? Having a lot of trouble setting jobs here.

[blapnk]

For luxurious rooms personally I just put a diamond statue made from pressed coal in with all the summoned stuff. Also, you know the summoned blocks can be used in the stonecrafters for even more options? I just really like having my tower have matching colors for everything and be made of 'magical' material even if it's worthless.

I thought warlocks and ghouls could be set menial labours, I seem to remember it being in a change log since dwarf therapist lets you set any labours regardless.

[RodriguesSting]

Had some trouble with dwarf therapist. Basically set skeletons to do all the labor (except the ones related to magic), and everyone else to do hauling.

Nothing got done.

I think I will try to set labors in-game now, or leave it the way it is until I actually need them to do something specific.

Anyways, thanks. Pressing coals into diamonds seems a little of overkill/cheating to me, but I don't care, a steady supply of diamond blades is way too tempting.

Edit: I remember reading the labors are hard-coded in the citizens of this game. Dos that means messing around with Dwarf Therapist might screw it all up if I don't do so carefully?

Edit 2: Apparently my ghouls can't butcher certain corpses because they are too small to hold any meat. However, most biomes I've embarked in are inhabited by small creatures. Maybe I should choose a savage one, in hope to be able to hunt bigger animals?

[Omnicast]

Dwarf Therapist probably doesn't work is probably because you didn't hit the commit changes button. It's on the top bar and right side. It has a green arrow on it. The red - is to clear/reset all changes currently listed. After you press commit it should change the labor ingame when you unpause it.

Now I have a question... how the heck do I plant trees? When I q my farm plot the only thing I can plant is "Tree Sapling", but they don't plant it all the time stating they need Acorns to plant them. What gives? I need trees to fuel my coke plant which in turn creates diamonds and also fuels my corrupted forges.

Bah! I must have only masterwork furniture even if it's just for the AESTHETICS! I'll just toss in artifacts to up the room value.

[RodriguesSting]

Dwarf Therapist probably doesn't work is probably because you didn't hit the commit changes button. It's on the top bar and right side. It has a green arrow on it. The red - is to clear/reset all changes currently listed. After you press commit it should change the labor ingame when you unpause it.

Now I have a question... how the heck do I plant trees? When I q my farm plot the only thing I can plant is "Tree Sapling", but they don't plant it all the time stating they need Acorns to plant them. What gives? I need trees to fuel my coke plant which in turn creates diamonds and also fuels my corrupted forges.

Bah! I must have only masterwork furniture even if it's just for the AESTHETICS! I'll just toss in artifacts to up the room value.

You're (probably) right about Dwarf Therapist. To be sure, I assign crafting just to skeletons (that's why I would rather have more of them). Also, never allow fishing... something to remember. My current problem is getting game that's both big enough to be butchered, but that's also not an apex predator capable of killing all my expedition members before I have time to hit stone (as happened in my last game, by Giant Dingoes). Probably must seek green wilderness, instead of yellow (untamed?) ones.

Now, as far as I know, at least in vanilla, you can't plant trees. But they probably modded the game to consider some kinds of trees as plants (to be gathered, and not chopped down, I guess?), so you can farm them. But really, can't give you any insight.

[blapnk]

Masterwork dwarves can get tree acorns from the sawmill and chopping block by smoothing wood (not sure about other kinds of woods) but I don't think warlocks have that reaction. You can also get them through herbalism (RodriguesSting is right, the farmed trees count as plants, and they appear in the wild). Their available on embark too but since warlocks are no trade that's your only chance. Dwarves can turn these farmed tree plants into proper wood at the sawmill and orcs can turn them straight into charcoal but as far as I can tell Warlocks can only shred them into wood splinters, not usable wood. I don't know if this is working as intended or has been fixed in a later version and I haven't noticed.

Or are you having the issue where you store all your seeds in a barrel and they become unavailable to farmers when another work takes the barrel and drags it around collecting all the other seeds that get dropped?